Windows: Having your computer wake up with you or wake up in the middle of the night to do routine tasks is a handy trick. WakeupOnStandby makes it easy to schedule that wake up call.

You can use the Windows Scheduled Tasks to schedule computer wake up calls, but the process is nowhere near as simple and straight forward as the single window dialog of WakeupOnStandby. If you have numerous and detailed tasks to schedule, you'll have to dig into the Windows Scheduled Tasks and set them all up—look under the advanced tab for the "wake on" check box—but for a basic wake up call with an associated task or two, WakeupOnStandby performs well.

You can pick the time of day and days of the week WakeupOnStandby will run, what program and parameters it will run on waking up, and what it will do after it runs the application. How long the app will stay awake and what it will do after a window of time are also up to you. You could, for example, have your computer come out of standby every morning and open your favorite web sites, or wake up every night and unpack your most recent downloads before going back to sleep. If you need to bust out some more advanced scheduling-fu make sure to check out our guide to using Windows Schedules Tasks. WakeupOnStandby is portable freeware, Windows only. Thanks Rich!